damnyank - I'm going to respond to your email here because the answer may be beneficiail to others who are in doubt regarding various backkup methods:
Imaging is clearly the best possible backup method - either Norton Ghost or Drive Image. I own and have used both, but a couple of monts ago I switched from Ghost to DI 2002 - it's just more user friendly and I've had fewer problems with compression. These programs create a "snapshot" of your hard drive - partition info and all. You can choose to just Image one file, one folder, one partition or the entire hard disk. If you do the latter and restore to a new hard disk, you will precisely recreate the orignal drive - partitions and all. It is a perfect backup method because it is a bit for bit copy. I image my boot drive to another drive regularly and to CDR's less frequently.
Second, I maintain a folder on my E: drive named "Backup". In this folder I have several sub-folders (Netscape, MS Office, ERUNT Registry, Templates, Word, Windows, etc.). Here I copy key user proferences, .ini files, .inf files, bookmarks, etc. Pretty much anything I want a backup of in case the original becomes corrupted.
Third I keep CD and Zip backups of downloaded software, my BACKUP folder, key data files, and anything else I don't want to lose.
So that's my backup system and regimen. It works for me. But the bootom line is -- whatever method(s) you choose, be sure to do some form of backkup. At the very minimum - backup your data files.
Hope this helps someone, somewhere, sometime.